A Comparative Study On The Two English Versions Of Zhang Tianyi’s Fairy Tale Da Lin He Xiao Lin

Under the background of the appeal to Chinese literature to "go global", the Chinese children’s literature recently has also made great strides towards the world, and the future is promising. Even so, to step into the map of world children’s literature, Chinese children’s literature has a long way to go. For English is the most widely used language in the world, entering English culture successfully is a must for Chinese children’s literature to step into the world map; while as far as the current situation is concerned, more C-E translation works with good quality are a big premise for Chinese children’s literature to make its way into English culture.According to incomplete statistics, the number of the C-E translation of Chinese children’s literature is increasing obviously in recent years. Although it is not a big total, the situation is hopeful. Instead, even though more and more researchers begin to pay close attention to the studies of children’s literature translation in recent years, the fact is that most people only focus on the Chinese translation of foreign children’s literature, and the translation of Chinese children’s literature into English or other foreign languages is nearly unnoticed. Actually, the total number of C-E.translation does not mean good quality of C-E translation. For the continuous progress of the C-E translation of Chinese children’s literature, it is necessary to reinforce the studies on the existing translation works and sum up the experience of success and lessons of failure.In the history of Chinese children’s literature, Zhang Tianyi must be a giant. Almost all of his children’s literature works have English translations, which appeared very early. For example, the first English translation of his critically acclaimed work Da Lin he Xiao Lin (in Chinese Pinyin), which was translated by Gladys Yang, was published in 1958; and in 2013, the other translation of this work, which was translated by Liu Jun, came out. Unfortunately, the research on the English translations can hardly be found till now.Therefore, in order to enrich the studies on the C-E translation of Chinese children’s literature, as well as put forward some useful advice for future C-E translation, this paper plans to get a general idea of the C-E translation of Chinese children’s literature from the aspects of its current situation, the causes of the situation, and the previous studies on the translation. Most importantly, it is going to explore how the different translation methods influence the readers’ reception for Chinese children’s literature works, and the two English versions of Zhang Tianyi’s fairy tale Da Lin he Xiao Lin, which are separated in time by over half a century, are the research objects. The research finds that because some of the language in Chinese children’s literature has special characteristics on sound, lexical, sentence and rhetorical level, it is often hard to give consideration to both the correctness of content and language features in translation. However, if the purpose of translation is to attract English-speaking children, the form and content of the target language should serve the effect, which conforms to that of the original text, while the effect is closely related to the language features. That is, if translators express the language features of the original text as much as possible based on the acceptance of English children, either free translation or literal translation is likely to present the original effect.